The Debats on Post-Socialism and the Politics of Knowledge in the Space of the Plural “Post’s”

In this article I focus on how the politics of knowledge, have being shaped in a world without socialism, can be also considered as a space of multiple “post’s”. Social researchers from the post-socialist region strive to return their countries onto the map and to identify their place in history, while applying different conceptual approaches based on different ideological premises. Meanwhile, all of these theoretical frameworks are not neutral in their relation to hegemonic discourses. Here I address the methodological nationalism, gender studies, and de-colonial discourse as the examples of “engaged knowledge”, while considering them as the most influential interpretative models among those that have become established in the post-socialist space after 1991, on the ruins of orthodox Marxism. What interests me most of all is the epistemological and political effects that they produce when they are applied to the analysis of the post-“post-socialist condition”. I argue that, depending on the interpretative optics, we might get quite different answers to such questions as whether the time has come to say “Goodbye, post-socialism!”, or to which extent the “Global East” can be considered as a useful category of analysis in the given circumstances. What I understand here by the ‘space of multiple “post’s”, is, firstly, a territory that, after the collapse of socialism, was inscribed into a new spatial constellation, but still continues to search for its place on the geopolitical map of the world and remains very sensitive to the politics of naming; secondly, I invoke it as a space of epistemological heteroglossia, that is, the one in which various ways of conceptualizing both the recent past and the actual present continue to compete with each other.